Lindeka Qampi is a self-taught photographer who primarily works in the genre of street photography. In 2006, she made photography her career after joining a consortium of photographers known as Iliso Labantu. For the past decade she has focused her attention on daily township life – especially Khayelitsha, the township in which she has lived since her teens. Her photographs express the poetry and politics of the ‘ordinary act’ and therein the potential of imagining new possibilities for the future.
Since 2012, Qampi has worked as a project facilitator alongside fellow South African photographer and visual activist Zanele Muholi. In 2014 they co-organized Photo XP at Aurora Girls School, Soweto, introducing photography as a life skill and empowering tool young women.
In 2015, Qampi began photographing herself and immediate family with a new series of work entitled Inside My Heart. Living in this World explores the issues of young men growing up in the townships with absent fathers. Qampi’s work has been exhibited internationally and is part of the collections in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Qampi is the co-recipient of the Brave Award (with Zanele Muholi; 2016), and the Mbokodo Award for Creative Photography (2015).
Artist Statement –
My work addresses the experiences of violence. I use visual poetry as a tool to break the silence of being a survivor of rape. I turn the lens onto myself in order to manage past experiences and emotions which I have tried to suppress psychologically.
I am using different art forms – poetry, lens-based media and visual arts – to create a dialogue around self-expression, as both a form of therapy and a way of zooming out my voice to the voiceless survivors who are still facing fears of violence. I use props in my images to highlight the gravity of the subject matter; recycling as a metaphor of bringing back life and creating a space of dignity for identity expression.